I can understand how we should be charged for every internal user of the Project Management System (PMS), but surely, there must be a way to give our clients access to the projects they're involved in without having to buy an extra seat for each of their employees, no?

I have over 20 years of experience empowering and enabling users with enterprise information systems that make a real and measurable difference in their ability to proactively manage their businesses and organizations.

I am a skilled Communicator and I only take the serious things seriously!

A portal user is not considered an internal user, and is not considered a user at all for licensing purposes.

Quoting from OpenERP S.A. -

The only way a user will not be a paying user is if they have the portal checkbox checked and if the content of the Portal's group of access rights groups has been validated by OpenERP (especially for write accesses).

What 'validated' by OpenERP means is that they can only write to the database in ways which makes reasonable sense for portal users. Changing the delivery date of an order would likely be a reasonable change a portal user would be allowed to make.

OK. It initially didn't work for me because I set the Project permission to "User". A rule would kick in and force the user to be an employee as apparently only employees can be true users of the Projects app. The portal user can't start a task he was assigned to per example.

I've also discovered that in Sales>Customers, we are able to give portal access to contacts we've added, linked to companies. The option is "hidden" in a dropdown on the top right.

I've found the following limitations:

Portal user can't see who is on the project team, even people from his own company

Portal user only has access to his own tasks. He can't get an overview of the project

Portal user can only comment on issues, he can't raise issues, mark tasks assigned to him as "in progress" or "completed"

Odoo users are not considered employees, employees don't even have to be users. Create a user and make them a portal user - it's that simple. I know a lot of partners who use Odoo and give their customers portal access to help project communication by providing ticket updates.

Hi Olivier, Are you talking about v8.0? I can verify that portal user don't see any other user nor in the message groups or contacts. But in the project a portal user can see other member of the project.

Well, I'm testing the online demo of Odoo (v8). I've created a portal user from the CRM module. When he logs in, he only sees the tasks he's been assigned to, not the whole project and thus can't see who else is participating.
I think the Project app has really been designed with internal users in mind. It's not a tool made for online collaboration with clients.

You are right, even in project I can't see anyone else! I'm puzzled because this was not the case a few weeks ago. I'm using 8.0rc1. Seems more to be kind of a bug. Because if a portal user is in a project he must see the others.

I've just done one more test...
So if you create all your users through the CRM module, then if you log in as one, you can see their tasks, but you can't see the ones of internal users.
I hope it's a bug then :)